Zodiac's written clues fascinate document expert

Lance Williams, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PST, Saturday, March 3, 2007

Forensic document examiner LLoyd Cunningham has examined thousands of documents related to the Zodiac killer, he uses a microscope, bottom, to view the documents on his computer at his Indian Wells home.
Jay Calderon/special to the Chronicle 03/01/7 cqd jmc less

Forensic document examiner LLoyd Cunningham has examined thousands of documents related to the Zodiac killer, he uses a microscope, bottom, to view the documents on his computer at his Indian Wells home.
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Photo: Jay Calderon

Photo: Jay Calderon

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Forensic document examiner LLoyd Cunningham has examined thousands of documents related to the Zodiac killer, he uses a microscope, bottom, to view the documents on his computer at his Indian Wells home.
Jay Calderon/special to the Chronicle 03/01/7 cqd jmc less

Forensic document examiner LLoyd Cunningham has examined thousands of documents related to the Zodiac killer, he uses a microscope, bottom, to view the documents on his computer at his Indian Wells home.
Jay ... more

Photo: Jay Calderon

Zodiac's written clues fascinate document expert

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It's a task that the world's leading expert on the handwriting of San Francisco's most notorious fugitive killer has undertaken literally thousands of times.

From somewhere in the world, someone -- police officer, news reporter or amateur sleuth -- has sent a document that person suspects was written by the Zodiac, the 1960s serial killer who taunted police with handwritten notes boasting of his crimes, then disappeared.

Patiently and methodically, forensic document examiner Lloyd Cunningham reviews the handwriting, comparing it to known samples of the Zodiac's own script, looking for a clue that finally will break the case.

But for 27 years, the result has always been the same: no match.

Cunningham, 67, began investigating the Zodiac while a San Francisco police officer and has continued on the case as a private consultant. He insists he feels no frustration when he sits down to examine the latest purported Zodiac document, knowing it is likely to turn out to be junk.

Nor, he says, is he daunted by the avalanche of new Zodiac suspects -- "friends, neighbors, relatives, ex-spouses, whoever people want to pin the Zodiac murders on," as he describes them -- likely to be generated by the new "Zodiac" movie.

"Who knows?" he said Thursday in a phone interview from his home near Palm Springs. "Maybe one of them is right."

Cunningham became a police officer in 1963. On the night of Oct. 11, 1969, while working a plainclothes assignment, he was among dozens of officers who flooded the Presidio after the shooting of cab driver Paul Stine -- the last of the Zodiac's verified kills.

In 1980, after training with the U.S. Secret Service, Cunningham became the department's first forensic document examiner. Before then, police had relied on the state crime lab to analyze documentary evidence.

While an officer, and since he retired in 1991, Cunningham has worked on hundreds of legal cases. For Colorado authorities, he examined the ransom letter in the JonBenet Ramsey case. He reconstructed notes that mass killers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng forced their victims to write in the 1980s sex-slave murder ring in Calaveras County.

Nothing in his career has been quite like Zodiac. Cunningham plunged into the case immediately after finishing his forensic training. In those days, police received as many as 30 purported Zodiac documents per week.

"All over the world, people were mesmerized by the Zodiac mystery," he says, "and everyone's relative or ex-friend became a suspect."

Cunningham spent long hours with what he calls the case's "Rosetta Stone" -- the letter received by The Chronicle two days after the Stine killing in 1969. Because it contains a bloodstained piece of the victim's shirt, it's the only Zodiac letter that undeniably came from the killer.

Over the years, Cunningham says he memorized Zodiac's handwriting, including the uniqueness of its letter forms. The killer crossed his "t" low on the vertical stroke, Cunningham notes, and formed a distinctive "saddle" between the legs of his lowercase "m." He usually left generous spacing between lines, Cunningham says.

Copycat Zodiac missives often can be easy to spot, he says. A tip-off to copied or disguised handwriting is a lack of "fluency," he says.

"There's a rhythm in writing," he says -- when people jot notes or sign documents, they write quickly and confidently. "But if someone tries to copy or disguise their handwriting, it's no longer spontaneous," he says, and an expert can see signs of the effort in the script.

Soon after he retired, Cunningham says he was brought back into the Zodiac case by the Vallejo police, who were taking a new run at solving the crime. Their suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen, a retired schoolteacher, former mental patient and convicted child molester who had been singled out by Zodiac investigators in the 1970s but was cleared after he passed a lie detector test. Allen, who died in 1992, is still the favorite Zodiac suspect of some experts on the case, including Robert Graysmith, the former Chronicle editorial cartoonist who wrote the book on which the movie was based.

In 1991, police raided Allen's home in Vallejo and seized a trove of potential evidence, including a box of handwritten letters that spanned 25 years. Cunningham spent days examining them.

"I went through every piece of his known writing and compared it, and I couldn't find any evidence to link him to the Zodiac writings," Cunningham says.

But police didn't give up on Allen. They theorized that Allen had committed the Zodiac killings with an accomplice and that the accomplice had written the Zodiac letters. Cunningham says he thought the theory was promising. When police seized specimens of the suspected accomplice's handwriting, Cunningham believed a break in the case had finally come.

"My heart was going pitter-pat," he says. Then he sat down with the documents.

"We really thought Arthur Leigh Allen did the killings and this guy did the writing," Cunningham says. "I was never so let down -- it just wasn't the guy."

The most recent Zodiac-style document that Cunningham has examined came to him via The Chronicle's photo archive.

In an envelope of old news photos of the Zodiac case, editorial assistant Daniel King found a Christmas card addressed to The Chronicle and postmarked 1990. The handwriting resembled the Zodiac's, and the card itself was similar to one the killer is thought to have sent to the newspaper during his killing spree.

No one at the newspaper today remembers receiving the Christmas card or how it came to be put in the Zodiac photo file. The Chronicle gave the card and envelope last week to Vallejo police, the lead agency on the Zodiac murders, and provided Cunningham with scans of the documents.

Cunningham pointed out several similarities between the writing on the envelope and the Zodiac's script but noted discrepancies as well. More important, he says, the writing looked like it had been done slowly and carefully and in places appeared to have been overwritten.

"The big problem you have here is, why would a person overwrite all of these letters?" he says. "The Zodiac never did that in any of his writings." The overwriting led him to suspect that the writer was copying or tracing the script from another document.

"I could never conclude that this is the writing of the Zodiac," he says. "It tends to lean the other way -- I have the impression that someone tried to imitate the Zodiac's handwriting."